Argot and Slang
Tags
Summary
Editor's review
Who it's for
A good fit for
- Professional translators of French literature or screen media who need to handle slang and colloquialisms
- Language enthusiasts studying the history of French vocabulary and shifts in colloquial speech
- History readers interested in nineteenth-century street culture and the language of marginal groups
- Advanced learners with some French who want to broaden their command of informal expression
Not a good fit for
- Absolute beginners in French: the book offers no systematic grammar or basic vocabulary instruction
- Readers seeking a guide to contemporary spoken French: the contents are markedly outdated
- Researchers requiring rigorous scholarly annotation and etymological sourcing
Reading tips
- Use it as a reference work: when you meet slang in a French text, look it up alphabetically.
- Read it in thematic batches, such as trade jargon or street invective, to avoid fatigue from reading straight through.
- For entries that interest you, note the source and context and compare them with modern expressions.
- Read it alongside French literary works and observe how the entries are actually used in the original texts.
About the publisher
Project Gutenberg is a digital publishing project focused on public-domain ebooks. Its publishing direction centers on classic literary works whose copyright has expired, covering genres such as poetry, drama, fiction, and epic. Representative books include Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, Proust's Du côté de chez Swann, Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Homer's The Iliad, Dante's La Divina Comèdia: Purgatòri, Cervantes's The History of Don Quixote, Volume 2, and Grahame's The Wind in the Willows. Its author resources consist mainly of classic Western writers such as Wordsworth, Proust, Shakespeare, Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Grahame, and Tolstoy. Its publishing feature is the provision of freely accessible ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats; it is not a traditional publisher, and publicly available information is limited.
Contents
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FAQ
Can this book be used to learn modern spoken French?
Can I read this book without knowing French?
In what order are the entries arranged, and is it easy to look things up?
Comments
Find this book
This site is an index: you start “Search all sources” in your browser, and the entries it lists all point to third-party sites; please judge their availability yourself.
About the author
Albert Barrère was a French compiler of French dictionaries, though public information about his life, including his birth and death dates, is limited. He is remembered for co-editing, with Charles Leland, the dictionary Argot and Slang. The work focuses on the colloquial speech of marginal social groups in French and English, systematically collecting and explaining slang, jargon, and cant as a distinct lexical subject and reflecting how popular language was actually used. Compiling such material required wide gathering and organizing of spoken usage, giving the work value both as a record of language and as dictionary-making. The dictionary is still consulted in the study of slang and popular usage, and through this collaborative work Barrère holds a place in the history of lexicography.
